Editor’s Note: This essay is a condensed version of the author’s previous piece for Minding the Sciences, titled “The Evolution of Intelligent Design Theory.” You can read the full-length version here.
Headlines occasionally flash across the start page of my Microsoft browser’s newsfeed that feature articles about Darwinian evolution or the supposed chemical origin of life. Was it the result of an alien race seeding our planet (Panspermia)? Or an asteroid bombardment with trace, amino and nucleic acids, the building blocks of proteins, DNA and RNA?
When I was a college student, one of my colleagues re-enacted the 1952 Miller-Urey experiment, originally designed to show how unguided chemical evolution could have occurred on a primordial Earth. After assembling the equipment, he evacuated the air using a vacuum pump, and charged the system with water, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen. This was refluxed in the absence of oxygen for a week while a continuous electric spark was passed through the vapor.
When I asked my colleague how his project was coming along, he turned to me, laughed, and said, “After this, I think I’ll write the Ten Commandments.”
His results failed to match those of the original researchers, which was that after several days, trace quantities of amino acids were found in the mixture, and voila! Life would shortly emerge after that, given a billion years or so.
Despite continuing efforts by origin of life researchers to demonstrate a plausible mechanism for unguided chemical evolution that ultimately led to life, none have been successful—not even close.
The original Miller-Urey experiment was not unguided and, therefore, was doomed from the start.
It had been designed. It had utilized designed glassware. The experiment had been conducted in a designed laboratory. Some intelligent designers collaborated and conducted the experiment under controlled conditions in a closed system. And there was an agreed-upon outcome that the researchers hoped to achieve.
If it demonstrated anything, it showed that intelligence preceded and then guided matter and energy toward a purposeful goal.
Common sense tells us that Swiss watches are made by Swiss watchmakers. Watches do not self-assemble. Computer code doesn’t write itself. Coders must initiate the process. And code is written on designed machines. Even artificial intelligence started from human intelligence.
The Gordian Knot of all origin of life research is that to make proteins and all other biomolecules that comprise life, you need molecular machines—enzymes—to do the job of assembly. These are themselves unfathomably complicated ensembles of proteins or RNA, in some cases.
It is a case of the proverbial chicken or the egg—which came first? Perhaps neither.
If you have ever watched “How It’s Made” on the Science Channel, you get the idea. Not only is it fascinating to watch how things are made, but the things don’t just assemble themselves. Most are manufactured by machines—robots in some cases—that were themselves designed and assembled by engineers for specific tasks. Once again, intelligence and planning preceded and? guided the assembly of matter utilizing energy toward a purposeful goal.
I have a thought game that I play with students in an introductory biochemistry class I teach.
When we began the study of protein synthesis, I showed them a photograph of my necktie drawer in chaos—before my wife spent an hour organizing the ties by folding them and neatly arranging them in three rows according to color. But I explained that I came home one afternoon and found the ties had spontaneously ordered themselves this way.
The best response I have ever gotten from a student was, “I hope you bought her flowers!” Common sense leads to common science. No student has ever thought this happened by blind, unguided chance not even if given “millions of years.”
The lesson is clear: someone intelligent, with an eye for color, a skill for artfully folding fabric—and a love for me—was behind the organized arrangement. My wife was acting as an intelligent designer.
Belief in God as the Intelligent Designer was the starting point for much scientific inquiry through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
“The great pioneers in physics – Newton, Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus – devoutly believed themselves called to find evidences of God in the physical world,” writes Stephen C. Meyer in the Return of the God Hypothesis, his latest book in which he makes a convincing case for the Judeo-Christin origins of modern science. “The founders … assumed that if they studied nature carefully, it would reveal its secrets. Their confidence in this assumption was grounded in both the Greek and the Judeo-Christian idea that the universe is an orderly system—a cosmos not a chaos.”
Origin of life researchers are starting to question seriously neo-Darwinism and leaning towards the better scientific theory of intelligent design. I remain an eternal optimist. Just this past week, an article entitled “How Science Suggests God May Have Created the Universe” flashed across my newsfeed.
Image by ana — Adobe Stock — Asset ID#: 994084761
Intelligent design?
Even a basic knowledge of biology suggests otherwise. We are an evolutionary hodgepodge. Our eyes see less than 1 percent of the light spectrum, and retinas detach easily – even the humble shrimp has better vision. We are also fitted with sub-optimal plumbing (breathing, eating, excretory and reproductive) and, yes, programmed to die – unlike Turritopsis dohrnii, the immortal jellyfish! But perhaps this should not come as a surprise: we are part of a world where at least 40 percent of animal species are parasites, and over 99 percent of all species that ever lived are extinct. A total of 105 billion people have lived so far; just over 8 billion of us are currently alive.
Sin has programmed us to die. But we were created to be immortal. This is such an inescapable part of our nature, that even you cited immortality as a defining characteristic of ID. Bravo! “And whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die. Do you believe this?” – John 11:26
Exactly! I will give them the contents of a cell with all the proteins, lipids, carbohydrates, and nucleic acids and it would still not self-assemble into life. I call this my “100 Dead Raccoons” scenario. (Maybe coming soon to MTC).
” It had utilized designed glassware. The experiment had been conducted in a designed laboratory. Some intelligent designers collaborated and conducted the experiment under controlled conditions in a closed system”
In theory it didn’t have to be.
In theory, if you could create and maintain a 30-40 PSI mixture of these four gasses, it would push the 15 PSI atmosphere away and you would have an uncontained atmosphere of these four gasses to zap.
This essentially is how an atomic bomb works — even though the massive amount of heat generated is rapidly dispersing the fissile material, enough of it is close enough, long enough, to have enough enough neutrons to have fission. (It’s also why the first bomb had something like 3% efficiency.)
There would be serious environmental consequences of doing this. Both Methane and Hydrogen would be explosive in these concentrations on the outside of the plume where it mixed with Oxygen-containing air, and Ammonia is lethal to both humans and I presume other forms of life. But my point is that you theoretically do this experiment outside of a closed environment.
I think the better question is if you do wind up with Amino Acids, what does that prove?
We have artificial blood that is used to save lives, but it doesn’t create life.
We theoretically could synthesize all the chemicals in the human body — that wouldn’t create a live human being.
So what do a few traces of amino acid prove, even if you really can create them….